With students across the county anxiously awaiting their GCSE results, our reporters look back on their own experiences upon opening the dreaded brown envelope.

Kathryn Bradley – senior reporter

I was fairly confident I had achieved the GCSE results I needed to get on to my chosen A level course. I had worked hard throughout the year and put in plenty of revision – even down to drawing giant colourful diagrams for each subject and pinning them up around my bedroom over my treasured Take That posters.

Because of this, I opted to have my results posted out to me instead of going in to school to collect them. In the end I was sorry I missed sharing the highs and lows of results day with my friends. Instead I received a plain brown envelope through the post and, as my parents were at work, there was no one there to share my success with.

Mark Shields – senior reporter

My friend and I were determined to be as laidback as possible, and tried to leave it to the last minute to pick up our results. But a slow-running bus ruined our fashionably late entrance and instead we almost missed getting our results completely as all the teachers were packing up and heading home by the time we got there.

Without the emotional backdrop of screaming, laughing and crying from other students, opening our results envelopes in the empty science block while our teachers looked at their watches felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

We got back on the bus and went back to my friend's house where his gran was waiting nervously. She gave us both a kiss on the cheek for having done so well, before we could even tell her our grades.

Susie Coen – Journalism placement student

Trying to be as cool as my older brother on his results day, I declared that I had definitely failed and I didn't care, which was doubly false. Deep down I knew that my clever combination of sunbathing with revision in the garden would have paid off.

I strolled into school at about midday and joined the queue of C's waiting eagerly for the A5-sized brown envelope containing our fate. A group of about seven of us assembled outside the school gates to avoid the heavy eyes of our teachers upon us whilst we ripped our letters open.

An awkward silence fell as everyone digested their results, followed by a further silence as nobody wanted to say how well they'd done in case others weren't so lucky. Thankfully, all of us did well enough, and our grins were plastered on us until the following morning.